It may be desirable for a transaction card company to employ external sales agents to register merchants to accept payment for goods and services via the transaction card, thereby enabling customers to pay the registered merchants for goods and services using the company's transaction cards. The registration process includes acquiring merchant information and storing that information for identification and other purposes.
Use of multiple external sales agents complicates the registration process. For example, duplicative registrations occur when one or multiple agents register a single merchant more than once over a period of time. Duplicative registrations can cost the transaction card company duplicative commission fees, cause technology performance problems and contribute to, or enable, fraudulent activity. As a result, managing the enrollment of merchants can be burdensome.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method of identifying and preventing duplicative merchant registrations.